Granta Best British Novelists (1983)

Typically in a Cold War thriller, particularly one written by a Brit,
you'd expect the "innocent" to be a dull-witted American anti-Communist,
who comes along, wreaks havoc, and leaves, all the while deluding himself
that he's made the world safer for democracy (see Graham Greene's The
Quiet American). But in Ian McEwan's novel, the "innocent" of
the title is Leonard Marnham, a young British telephone technician, who
has come to a divided Berlin in 1955, to work on one of the great intelligence
coups of the Cold War, Operation Gold, a tap on the Soviet telephone lines
in a tunnel beneath the city. Not only is Leonard an innocent when
it comes to superpower espionage, he's also a neophyte when it comes to
women, so when Maria, an attractive German woman, approaches him in a nightclub
and then begins a torrid affair with him, he's too dense to see why it
might raise the suspicions.

Inevitably, the story concerns the loss of innocence, and Leonard begins
to change in some frightening ways. Chiefly, he begins to associate
himself with the conquering West and Maria with the defeated Germany, treating
her with mounting brutality in their lovemaking, until one day he goes
too far. But the lovers make it through this rough patch only to
face a crisis when they accidentally kill Maria's ex-husband. This
event triggers a catastrophe of international dimensions, as innocent,
now become guilty, brings down everything around him. There are final
ironies here that it would be unfair to prospective readers to discuss;
suffice it to say that it turns out that everyone else has been just as
innocent of the real world as Leonard seemed, or at least as easily duped.

The book is an adequate spy novel, with some interesting true background--Operation
Gold was a real project--and some entertaining psychological twists and
turns. But in a strange way those final ironies serve to blunt the
impact of the book, revealing that however corrupting were the effects
of the Cold War, we in the West were never sufficiently corrupt to understand
what was really going on.